Serenissima

SERENISSIMA /Paula Huston THEY HAD LITERALLY BEEN planning this trip for years— Shana had longed to see Italy since she was a girl—and they were supposed to have gone in 1952, for their honeymoon. But they'd had no money at aU and the war devastation still lay across Europe tike a smoking blanket and so it was put off, though with the absolute promise to one another that they'd go as soon as they possibly could—certainly before they had a chUd. However, Amy, unplanned and unexpected, was born less than a year later, and the trip was of course out of the question whUe she was stiU toddUng about. Besides, Perry had just started his new job with Boeing, and how could they think about giving up the money when other young couples they knew were struggling so? Then, Ui 1955, Shana's grandmother died and left them enough cash to either buy a house or travel to Europe. They'd actuaUy bought Uner tickets for the summer when Shana found she was pregnant again. They postponed the voyage, thinking they'd go the foUowing year, but Chris's birth was not easy, and then Shana's sister lost her infant to some mysterious aüment that struck him down in the crib, and suddenly Shana sUpped into a sorrow so profound that she had to be hospitalized for three months. The doctors caUed it "postpartum depression"; aU Shana knew was that night after night she could not sleep, no matter how exhausted she was or how her eyes burned, and that often she would find her face wet with tears she was not even aware of shedding. EventuaUy she recovered, but in the same way, she thought, that one recovers from a knee injury; scar tissue had formed and the apparatus of her psyche was looser, more fragüe. Where she'd once characterized herself as brave and hopeful, she now often felt shadowed by a free-floating fear that she had to work hard to hide. This time when the trip was postponed, it was put off indefinitely; her grandmother's money went into a three-bedroom house in a clean, modest neighborhood, and Perry and Shana settled down, as best they could, to the raising of their famUy. But now it was 1970, the girls were seventeen and fifteen, and they were finaUy making the trip together. It was the middle The Missouri Review · 139 of July, a steamy Italian summer afternoon, and they had been driving for hours through thick, poUuted heat on their way to one of the world's greatest cities. Shana was staring out the window, searching for Venice amidst the factory haze and shipyard confusion that surrounded it, when she spotted the sign, "Serenissima," the campground they'd been seeking. It was just off the main highway to Padua and along a dirty canal, but weU back from the road at least. An old vUla, typicaUy ItaUan, with its plaster peeUng back from its rose-colored bricks and a long tree-Uned lane behind it with tents scattered about on the grass. As they turned in at the gate, the girls began to stir and waken, grumpy from their long, heated naps. "Shana, how much does the book say?" Perry asked her. "Fourteen thousand lire." "Not bad for this close to the city. Look, there's even a bus stop." By now they had been married for eighteen years, they'd been through some difficult tunes together (she thought, in an awful flash, of her months in the hospital) but Perry had never lost his capacity for deUght. Look! There's a bus stop! She knew that they did not see the world in the same way. He had the stight energetic body of a boy, the thick curting hair and hornrimmed glasses of a scholar, and the soul, she sometimes told him, of a saint to have put up with the dubious, flinching nature she'd developed in the years after her breakdown. She'd cultivated a habit of always holding something back, a practice she despised in others and knew to be cowardly in herself even...